Virtual reality creates an illusion of reality with realistic images, sounds, and other sensations that replicate a real environment or an imaginary setting. A virtual reality environment would offer a user immersion, navigation, and manipulation that simulate his physical presence in the real world or imaginary world. Current trends for virtual reality content revolve around the development of video games and movies. In particular, several video playback applications which allow videos to be played in a virtual reality system have been created recently and have delivered a powerful immersive cinema experience with unlimited screen space and minimal distractions from the real world.
However, videos may come in various different screen modes (e.g. flat screen, 180-degree, and 360-degree screen viewing modes) and different stereoscopic rendering techniques (e.g. monoscopic, side-by-side stereoscopic, and over-under stereoscopic modes). Video containers do not carry such metadata so the user needs to proceed through a trial-and-error process to determine the best viewing configuration. If a wrong video viewing mode is selected, video images would be distorted with visual artifacts and become unpleasant to view. The user would have to make another selection until the best one is found. The entire process can be extremely tedious and time-consuming and lead to user frustration.